Vanguard: Gremlins And Orcs
After completing The Menace Grows, Ju Ming gives me one last task to perform. This one is called The Head of the Beast. I am to go find gremlin Augurs and wrest something called a Pulsating Portal Shard from their grubby little claws. I must obtain enough shards to combine them into an Orb of Calling. This Orb will summon the Kojuko General who, not surprisingly, needs killed.
As I mentioned in my last post, if you keep going along the coast, you’ll find more and tougher types of gremlins. So, I ran past the first two camps that I attacked earlier and found the third camp. This one had the Augurs. I dispatched some Augurs and found some portal shards, but I didn’t combine them. This quest is a group quest, so I’ll need to wait until I can find some help before finishing this one.
Speaking of finding a group, in all my time spent in this gremlin area, I only saw one other player the entire time. Even after SOE merged some servers, the player population is very low. It may be better at the higher levels, but as a low level player, it is rather disheartening.
Just a few steps away from Ju Ming, there is a fellow named Nao Tak. He also gives out some quests. One of them is called Otherwordly Artifacts. He wants me to kill gremlins and recover 5 inert portal shards and 5 fiendish portal shards. Gremlin killing seems to be common pasttime around these parts.
I ran around and killed random gremlins until I had enough of the shards. I returned them to Nao Tak and I received 2431 experience and a measly 60 copper. Are Ju Ming and Nao Tak related or something? Nao gives one last quest called To Lotus Hold. I sat that one aside and worked on a few other quests first.
Back at the Nakai Dojo, Lieutenant Oda has some tasks for me. I get from him the Pride of the Army quest. I am to patrol the road leading out of the Dojo and look for invading Martok orcs. I have to visit 4 patrol points and clean out any orcs I find.
The way it worked out is that you simply run down the road and wait for an invisible Martok Ambusher to jump you. Kill the orc, run down the road some more, and wait to be jumped again. You do this until you have reached all four patrol points.
I returned to Oda after completing my patrol and I discovered that he didn’t seem to have much confidence in my abilities.
Prick.
–Wolfen
Vanguard: After The Big Update
The folks at Sony gave Vanguard a big update while I was away from the game. I had completely forgotten about it until it came time to buy my new spells. I dinged level 15 while whacking gremlins, so I went over to the Nakai Dojo to see what was available.
I hit up the Druid spell vendor and that is when I remembered the game update. There were several spells for the levels I had already gone through as well as some nice ones for my current level. Some of the highlights for me were:
- Lifestream 1: AOE Heal
- Rampant Roots: AOE Root
- Ire II: Arcane Direct Damage
- Wolf Shape: Turns me into a wolf
- Ant Shape: Turns me into an invisible ant for 3 minutes
- Starfall: 1982-2087 Direct Damage
For soloing, the two that really stand out for me are Ant Shape and Starfall. Ant Shape is really just a fancy way of granting invisibility. I turn into a small ant that I can see but enemies can’t see. Three minutes isn’t very long, but it is nice to know when it will wear off. It also has a five minute refresh before you can use it again.
The other great spell is Starfall. With the damage is produces, I am able to one-shot kill orcs with ease. The one limiting factor to Starfall is that it uses Phenomena points. You have a set number of points and each time you cast Starfall is subtracts from that total. Once you use up those points, you must wait for them to refresh. I believe it takes 1 hour for used points to refresh.
They claim that there were some graphical performance tweaks in the update, but everything seems the same for me. It runs just like it did in January. Things still hitch and I still have to use the /flush command every now and then to get performance back. They claim that a fix for the hitching is on the way. Let’s hope so. As a reminder, my PC is an AMD X2 6000+, 3gb RAM, and a Nvidia 8600GT 512mb video card.
Read MoreA Return To Vanguard: Saga of Heroes
So I’m finally back to playing and blogging. I started up Vanguard from right where I left off, so here is the continuation of my gaming experiences.
I had been running some quests that Ju Ming had given me, so I looked in my quest journal and started from there. I began with The Gremlin Menace quest. It seems Ju Ming wants a few gremlins dead, so he tasks me with going out and killing some Kojuko Despoilers and Ravagers.
The gremlins are found along the coast not far from Ju Ming’s house. The first gremlin camp I encountered had the gremlins I was looking for. They were guarding a portal that they were using for nefarious reasons. Naturally, I did my duty and dispatched the required number of gremlins. The gremlins were numerous but I could easily pull them all solo.
I returned to Ju Ming and told him of my good deeds. He rewarded me with 1905 experience and 1 silver, 10 copper cash money. If you ask me, he’s a little stingy with the coin.
The next quest he gives is called The Menace Grows. This time I am tasked with killing gremlin Disrupters and Razorclaws. You can find these gremlins by traveling past the first gremlin camp. The camp is right next to the first. In fact, if you keep traveling along the coast, you will come across camp after camp of gremlins. The further you go the tougher the gremlin you find. Once again, I did my duty and slew many o’ gremlin.
Ju Ming was pleased with my progress, but once again he was stingy with the coin. I received 1 silver, 20 copper for my efforts. Experience rewarded: 2341
–Wolfen
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